How to make kids attend on the last day of term

For the seven years the kids were at primary school, getting them in on the last day of term was never an issue, though it did seem fairly pointless. They'd watch a Disney movie or play a board game, then return home early, cheering loudly as they left the building. The biggies attended a high school with over 1200 kids. As soon as they started there, it became clear that attending on the last day of term was not the cool thing to do, by any stretch of the imagination. Already by the last week you needed thumb screws to get them out of bed as they claimed they were doing nothing of any use and instead of the usual huge traffic jam up Waterfoot road, there would be fewer than 20 cars on the hill. The last day often took a serious amount of blackmail. I made them go in, much to their disgust, and they would be corralled into a class with the other four or five kids from their 250+ year with parents as evil as me, once again to watch the first 50 minutes of a movie in each class before the bell rang! I never fully worked out whether the teachers and council would prefer us just to throw in the towel and give up altogether, or persevere. I was also often amazed that if I did manage to get them in (as one of about 10% of the kids who showed up), the school office would phone angrily if they dared to leave just twenty minutes before the end of the day, even if it was during the lunch break. All in all, the last day of the high school term was a complete washout and best forgotten.

Last week was the last day of the summer term here. I fully expected at least Léon's school class to have no interest in attending but I was very wrong. The last few days of term were spent intently beavering away on some communal secret plans. It turned out they were coming up with a menu - last time I saw it, it listed bacon, chicken bacon, hamburgers, pancakes, digestives, fruit juice, freshly-baked rolls, jam, grapes, watermelon, chocolate milk, eggs, etc and a list of activities. They turned up at 8am as usual - the entire class(!), each with an item or two from the list and spent the entire morning having a banquet with their main class. At lunchtime, they weren't hungry any more so the kids and their teachers walked over to the outdoor swimming pool (5 minutes from school), with the swimming costumes they'd agreed to bring along and spent the afternoon in the pool, finally drying off, lying in the park listening to music on a large speaker one of the kids had borrowed from his older brother. Finally around 2pm, the summer holidays were ready to begin.

Now Léon can't wait for the last day of every term in Danish school - he's already imagining Gløgg, Xmas cakes and cookies in December.

How our Danish schools do birthdays

Back at our Scottish school, I used to find birthdays a bit of a burden. I had five kids (granted I only ever had three at primary at the one time, so let's work on that premise...) Each of the kids had between 30 and 33 kids in their class so when Léon was in primary 7, the classes were made up of 33+33+30 kids minus my 3 own kids which gave me a calculation of 93 kids a year who could potentially have parties. In p1 and 2 the whole class was generally invited, by the later years we were probably down to one gender, so half the class. So I was averaging somewhere in the region of 45 parties a year. The standard outlay was between £10 and £20 per present. I tried to stay at the £10 end except for besties but could see that the average was closer to the other end. So attending other kids' parties cost a minimum of £450 a year, and was probably nearer to £600. With this outlay for others, ironically, I was left without enough to throw parties for my own kids as that would have set me back a minimum £200 a head too. They had at most two or three close friends home for dinner every other year and felt distinctly like second-class citizens.

On Amaia's very first day at Veflinge primary an invite was ominously waiting on her desk addressed simply 'New girl'. We opened it to find she'd been invited bowling with the girls in her class for someone's birthday today - a fairly standard party we would have at home too. Here we go again... or not as the case may be!

Having joined the class Facebook group this week, we messaged the group admin to find out what kind of gift of what value was expected so as not to make our kids seem even odder than they must already seem. The format was then explained to us. Each child in the class is assigned another child in the class - the one whose birthday is closest to their own. A month before their birthday, you ask that child for a wish list and choose something to a value of max £22 to give that child from the class as a whole. That is the only gift the child receives from the class, while the kids still get the nice bowling trip, chips and ice cream and cake at school on the day. This system makes it affordable for all and means every kid gets a present from the class to the same value. I often found back home that the kids with the most invited the most kids and got even more while those with the least had to forego parties and presents of their own. And another positive is that when you come home you don't have 30+ gifts to have to fit into your kid's bedroom and an overwhelmed child in a meltdown!

Maybe this way I'll even be able to afford to throw my kids a class party at last!

Things... #3

...you don't see on the school run in Newton Mearns.

A garden with a traditional windmill on the driveway up to their house!

Things... #2

...you don't see on the school run in Newton Mearns.

A wee 'gingerbread' cottage by a lake. (Appearances are deceptive - it may be in a village but it's 20 minutes from Odense city and 8 minutes from the main Danish east west and north south motorway!)

This one is even more interesting as it is for sale at the moment. See this link. Unlike in Scotland where we sell at 'offers over' a specific price, Danish houses around here seem to be listed at a fixed price and you are meant to bid under but close to it! This is a three bedroom with a living surface area 15% bigger than my mum's roughcast 70s house in Newton Mearns (which retails around £230K). It is on the market in a country where salaries are much higher than at home for a fixed price of about £88K! And my goodness, isn't is cute as hell?!

Deregulation

     

In Scotland we had built up an amazing garden over the 12 years we were in that house. By that I don't mean amazing by the usual Newton Mearns standards... It wasn't the perfect and pristine garden of a show house with all the flowers in matching shades in neatly weeded beds... It was mad and wild and messy but almost everything in it was edible and there was way too much for one family to use. 

We had four different types of rhubarb and we only ever got through a quarter of it. We had strawberries all of June and early July, we had a whole late summer and autumn of raspberries, tay berries, brambles, white currants, red currants, black currants and wild strawberries. We had red love apples (last year we tried working our way through the table full of crates but didn't get close to finishing). There were two pear trees. We had so many crab apples I could have made jelly for all the local supermarkets, but contented myself with half a dozen jars and left the rest to the birds. We had one greengage, one cherry and one plum too. Like the strawberries, the kids did get through most of the blueberries we grew, though. More exotically we had two quince trees and, if you were feeling even more adventurous, a medlar!  

In the herb patch we had chives, rosemary, two types of oregano, two types of thyme, three types of sage, three types of mint (segregated for the sake of the other plants!), lovage, angelica, bay leaves and a cardoon! In the greenhouse I was knee-deep in grapes and figs but by early autumn the wasps had beaten me to them, as I was again overloaded with too many fruits. 

And those were just the plants that popped up every year with no help from us.

Round the side Thomas grew beans, peas, celery, onions, garlic, kale, lettuce and various squashes.

Interspersed with all the fruit were flowers. It was messy and wild like everything else in our lives, but it was functional, fun and yummy. The only problem was I had way more than my family and close neighbours could eat. Waitrose was selling three sticks of rhubarb for £2 and I had a spare 400 sticks rotting in my garden and no amount of jam making could keep up with it. 

Now I have been in Denmark for a couple of weeks, I've started noticing these little constructions at the bottom every fourth or fifth driveway in the town where Anna and Amaia have started school. These are barrows, a stall or even a wooden box on its side, usually with cute little Danish flags on the top. Inside are trays full of fresh strawberries, potatoes, cabbages or similar with prices hand-written on them. There is also a wee sealed money box and also a 'mobile pay' phone number. People are selling off all the surplus from their gardens! Not content with food, some even put out bunches of flowers, saplings, homemade jam or honey and similar.

Some have even taken it to a whole new level putting out their artwork or ceramics too. Here's one in the next village who paints stone chickens and hangs them on her fence for sale!

I could have made an absolute fortune in Scotland if I had been free to do something like this. It is just wonderful to think that any surplus I have in the future won't be left rotting on the trees and bushes. I'm definitely away to knock myself up a wee stall - I might even stick a Saltire on it alongside my wee Danish flag 😀

Things... #1

...you don't see on the school run in Newton Mearns.

I thought I'd do a wee photo from time to time of things that make me stop on the school run and simply go - woah!

















The biggest poppy field I've seen outside of a Monet or Renoir painting!

Braving the liquorice

I've mentioned their liquorice fetish before, but I'm now surrounded by it.

On my first day back over here a couple of weeks ago, we arrived in the heat. We pulled into the first supermarket after we arrived - the Lidl in everyone's favourite (comic-value) town 'Middelfart'  (the kids have almost stopped chuckling about this now). We bought some caramel ice lollies to cool down and while we were looking in the freezers, I spied these:

My first reaction was to recoil in horror, but I noticed they were described as 'sweet' so figured they were probably not all that bad - I can just about stomach liquorice allsorts at home after all. For some reason (probably the pic which depicted something cream coloured in a black casing), I had it in my head that it was probably a vanilla ice cream like you find in a magnum with a mildly sweet liquorice covering... 

I decided today that I should try to fit in in my new surroundings. I think the only two things I vaguely dislike eating are horseradish sauce and wasabi, so I'm not someone who could be described as a fussy eater. I bit into it. The casing was strong and definitely not sweet liquorice. The inner ice was indeed cream coloured but was more zebra like. Salt liquorice fissures ran the full length of its innards. I tried a second bite. The warm bile-like taste was truly horrendous. Not one to give up, I tried a third bite. With each bite the taste was becoming significantly less palatable. I threw in the towel and rushed inside for something, anything, to take away the taste. I tried a fresh, juicy cherry tomato but the salt was still burning my throat. Thomas had made fresh seeded rolls for breakfast so I pulled off a chunk to see if, like with a strong chilli, bread would help - nope! I found a lump of fancy yellow watermelon in the fridge - still no luck. Finally, I opted for a black olive, a pickled chilli and a large lump of Pié d'Angloys all washed down with a strong coffee. I have almost managed to shake off the flavour though I expect it might be a recurring theme in all future nightmares.

It was truly the most offensive thing I have ever tasted, worse even than salt liquorice sweets. I'm not sure I'm going to fit in in Scandinavia. Have I actually managed to find the only thing that is harder to stomach than Brexit?! 😂

A different take on lollipopping

This one is for my friend Stephanie!

Back at Kirkhill, we had the best lollipop lady. I won't go into the details because I already have here, but she was a real gem. Despite being cheery, caring, helpful and generally lovely, she had to put up with drivers driving at her aggressively, swearing, nastiness and all sorts of dangerous behaviour despite it supposedly being a 'nice' area and the fact that the kids she was trying to safely cross over often belonged to the shouty stressbuckets!

I've been doing the school run here for nearly a week now. As we aren't yet in catchment for where we intend to end up and therefore where the kids are already at school, I am not only passing their two schools but at least three others en route.

Denmark, or at least here on the island of Funen, has come up with a different model for lollipop people. Presumably it must work too, given they are using the system so I thought I'd note it down just because it is so different.

At each school I pass there are two kids - I'd say looking at them they range in age from about 11 to maybe 16. Each is dressed in neon yellow with a big yellow lollipop-shaped sign. They are at the crossing in front of each school, one on either side of the road on the pavement. They simply stand at the edge and when a child wants to cross they put up their lollipop. Not only are all the cars already driving really cautiously because the lollipop people are kids, but they instantly stop safely and in a friendly manner on the kids' signal because they don't see them as annoying targets but instead as helpful children who need protecting.

Wouldn't it be nice to treat our crossing patrol people like that at home?

Léon's first Danish lesson

Léon was always going to approach this in a cocky and positive manner. To be honest, I've been quite apprehensive that he might crash and burn at the end of the first day. Léon's spoken Danish is best of all the kids - he's been hearing it longest, he's had his phone and computer in Danish for some time, two years ago he spent a summer alone with the Danish grandparents so spoke Danish all the time and generally he has a confidence and an extrovert personality the others don't. Anna or Amaia are perhaps a bit better at reading or writing Danish as they're more diligent and less slapdash, but Léon can wing most things and languages are his thing. He's part of a WhatsApp group with the kids from his grandparents' Italian village and never having learnt that doesn't stop him thinking he's practically an Italian native speaker.

When he was given his starting date and timetable I noticed his first period in Danish school was going to be double Danish - gulp. I became more scared he'd find it a bit daunting and lose confidence... silly me😜

When I picked him up, I asked how his first class with 'Claus' had gone. I had no real idea of what they do in Danish classes, so assumed it might be similar to his English lessons at home. His first task was to research food waste on the Internet, come up with the issues and debate them through a PowerPoint presentation. How daunting would that be in a language which is spelt as oddly as English? Even I was nervous to hear how that had gone.

A dual positive to Léon's personality is his ability to laugh at himself, while not being overly embarrassed by his own failings...

Danish is a bastard of a language when it comes to the correlation between spelling and pronunciation. It is also full of silent letters you just don't know are there if you learn it orally. Danish for 'food waste' is 'madspild', of course with a silent 'd'. Léon, not knowing about the 'd' guessed it was probably spelt 'madspil' as it was pronounced so gave a riveting Powerpoint to an amused group of 13 year olds on the topic of 'food games'. This change of meaning caused by a silent letter would have had Anna running for the door in embarrassment, but Léon thought it only added to his street cred. They all now think he's a great laugh!

That morning he'd been introduced as the Scottish kid who moved to Denmark 9 days earlier. As they were leaving school, one kid ran up to him in the playground and exclaimed in Danish 'Fuck, mate, if you learnt Danish that well in just 9 days, you're gonna be the cleverest kid in the school!' I asked if Léon fessed up to having been spoken to in Danish since he was born... of course not, he winked!

Love that boy.😀

First school trip

As school is winding down towards the summer break, school trips are the thing this week.

On her first day Anna was told there are two (free) school trips this week - one today to learn kayaking in the sea half an hour away and another to an animal thing on Friday - a farming auction or similar - I'm not fully sure yet but will no doubt work it out once she's been.

First odd thing from a compare-with-home perspective - Anna had missed the consent and info handed out in previous weeks, so she came home with a hand-written note from the teacher with her personal mobile number on it asking us to call her. When Thomas rang, she told us that a bunch of parents had volunteered to drive all the kids to the coast and drop them there with the teacher and instructors to save hiring a bus. Anna was told to go with the mother of the girl she'd befriended on day one.

On arrival at the coast she had a 2 hour kayaking session in the shallow sea and when it came lunch time the teacher invited her class back to her place for afternoon cake and 'hygge' in her garden! The class's Maths teacher who is currently on maternity leave with a 2 month old son also turned up for coffee and to show off her baby to the class and they all hung about in the teacher's paddling pool eating before the parents went back to collect them and drop them back at school around 4pm!

This is all so very alien to us still but quite welcoming so far.

Danish school - day one

Since we had our tour of the two Danish schools last Thursday, we've had varying degrees of bravado and worry vis a vis going to school in a different language - some more predictable than others.

Monday was a bank holiday here - another of these weird religious days we work in Scotland, so Tuesday was chosen as D-day. As all three were starting at 8-10am, we tossed up for it (the schools are in neighbouring towns, 5km apart) and I definitely won - ie I got Léon, who thought it was going to be a breeze, rather than Anna who said she wasn't sure why she needed to attend Danish school at all and she would rather just pass on all friends going forward! Amaia was somewhere in the middle - surprisingly calm.

So here's the lowdown on the lower school...

All seemed ok on drop off and the girls went in without impersonating a scared cat at the vets, so that wasn't dire. Personally, I was particularly amused by the mural at this lower school (age 6-12) - a 3D naked man seems to be distributing owls to naked women on their knees (not sure for what purpose) - very Scandinavian - I'm not sure you'd find that on an Anglo-Saxon primary school entrance wall - it's a shame they don't have a uniform here because if they did the blazer badge could be a picture of a naked bloke in an aviary! That might be quite fun to design. 😁

There are also smaller murals on the playground wall - these are on the p1 bit - I just love this! Someone's arse on a toilet 😂!

The primary here in Veflinge only has about 100 kids so they gather in the mornings to sing songs as a welcome. They started with 'I like the flowers, I like the daffodils...' all up on a whiteboard so they could sing along, so that was fun. Amaia's teacher also seems to do that welcome thing we've all seen on the internet, which is quite sweet.

Differences we've noticed so far...

No uniform - of course, and they dump their shoes at the entrance and run about in socks everywhere indoors.

Classes are all under 20 kids which is a nice ratio of teachers to kids.

The kids call the teachers (and the headmaster) by their first name - Amaia's teachers are Henriette and Morten, Anna's is Birgitte. Morten is apparently the Maths teacher and wears a superman T-shirt with an M on it and calls himself SuperMorten!

They don't have designated playgrounds other than for the infants so the kids can choose between the football field at the back, the basketball court or the large garden filled with climbing things. They are also allowed to wander off into the small forest behind the school if they want at interval and lunch.

There are home economics kitchens for the primary pupils and shower rooms for the little ones too.

They are much more laid back when it comes to consent - two kids in Amaia's class were turning nine yesterday and they were simply handed pieces of birthday cake without consent forms in triplicate and the Spanish inquisition - that is a breath of fresh air, after many years of filling out the same form over and over!

They have come up with a cute way of dealing with birthdays - each child is meant to bring in a gift for the child whose birthday comes next so Amaia has been assigned a girl who is turning ten ten days after her next January.

At the end of the day, different ages get out at different times - Amaia's day finishes at 1-50, but as they would like the kids to get some exercise, you aren't to pick them up till half an hour after the bell so they can go on the jungle gym and run around the basketball court with their friends! Anna gets to stay half an hour longer but as they'll all eventually be walking home or coming by bus if we move to the neighbouring town, then it's no big deal.

I'll do Léon separately so this doesn't get too long😀

Flowery selfies

I took this photo back in Italy in 2017.

We'd found a stunning field of sunflowers by the roadside in Poppi in Tuscany.

Amaia remembers it well and asked today, now Charlotte has arrived, if they could redo it with poppies instead of sunflowers - let's compare the two!

(Got to laugh - here's the photo she took! You can't see the poppies!)

Danish school - part one

So this is how the 'little' three started the school session 2018-19. And on Tuesday, I'll update it to how they are finishing it. They are going to try out Danish school for three weeks just to see what it is like!

Yesterday we got word that the schools we had been hoping to get them into had a space for each of them, despite their not yet being in catchment. We went along for a meeting with the head teacher and a tour of the two schools.

The first thing that struck me and the kids, as Scottish people was that the head was dressed casually and introduced himself as 'Kim'. As we walked about in the school, the kids all seemed pretty similar to those in Kirkhill or Mearns Castle, though Léon's mouth fell open when two of the eight year olds in one of the classes rushed up to 'Kim' and gave him a great big hug. Léon turned to me and said he could never have imagined doing that to Mrs Donaldson back in his primary days! On entering what will be Amaia's class, a pretty young teacher introduced herself as Henrietta and asked Amaia her name. Interestingly, the class sizes are all under 20 kids too, so that'll be a help when the kids are trying to get up to scratch with their written Danish and may need to ask for extra help with the odd word 😊

Other differences we've noted so far were mini-shower rooms for kids as young as seven for after their PE lessons. I didn't see a shower at school till I turned 11! They also seem to have proper 30cm sharp knives in the home economics classrooms (like those we have given the kids to use since they were little). Back in Scotland Léon constantly complains about high school insisting the younger kids use implements bordering on butter knives, for 'health and safety' reasons!

Léon's ears pricked up when school trips to the likes of Berlin were mentioned. It'll be interesting to see how much they want for that as we've always considered the high school trips in Scotland beyond our means. The kids have only ever taken part in World Challenge trips which they have fund-raised themselves, but despite wonderful trips to France, Italy and the US being on offer every year, they always come in at about double what I would expect to pay... so watch this space.

Induction also seems to be done differently... Anna will be moving up to the middle school in the session beginning August 2020. Back home she was due to start Mearns Castle this summer and three induction days had been arranged for this week. Apparently at the new school she will go to the middle school every Thursday next year to get ready for the move.

As we were leaving, a child passed wearing a Denmark football top. Because of the risk sectarian nonsense back home, football tops were a no no even on dress as you please days. Now every day is going to be dress as you please, Amaia chanced her arm and asked if she could wear her Real Madrid strip to school. The head didn't even understand why that could be an issue! Amaia is a very happy bunny.

Camping holiday?

We went shopping today in Flensburg in Germany. The big hypermarket was selling four-man tents for the summer holidays, but not just any four-man tents - tents like I've never seen them before! Léon could definitely be talked into one of these!

I was thinking the kids could get this for the three of them and as Thomas and I are getting on a bit, we could invest in this so we could all go camping together 😂

Love to travel

I've been a traveller much longer than I have travelled...

From the first time I heard a foreign language, I knew I needed to escape the island where I was born and see other cultures, climates, people - over and over again. And although the travelling itself can get tiring the older you get and the more small people you have in tow, there are still few things I love more than the people-watching involved in international ports and airports.

When I left the UK on Sunday, I couldn't help but smile quietly when I found myself behind a bloke checking in on the Venice flight wearing a jacket covered in different dinosaurs and pizza slices! Where do you even buy something like that! (Excuse the near-bum shot, he bent over as I took it!) Isn't the world just a wonderful mix of individuality? I just love how different we all are!

Omg, I actually found it online. Lol. 

House selling - episode one

I'm starting this series of blog posts the week the house goes on the market, but I expect I won't be hitting the 'publish' button on all the instalments till after someone has made an offer and the money is safely in my bank account! I obviously won't bore you with the mundane but will pick out the notable elements of this process and give an anonymised account of some of the more memorable visitors to my abode. 😉


It's taken the best part of three months to tidy, de-clutter and touch up twelve years worth of up to seven inhabitants. Thomas has been away for half that time so single-parenting five kids who are in varying degrees of meltdown about our move, while DIYing my way through the first month after my consultant has okayed me lifting something heavier than a kettle, while moving box after box out to storage or the local dump haven't been my favourite pastimes. Of course, it also all coincides with Marcel's finals, including the dreaded dissertation, and Charlotte's first year uni exams. Joy!

The house is now tidy but a bit odd. We're two couches and four dining chairs down, we've no books left, only a kindle and no TV, or any such thing for rainy-day entertainment! All we have left is a travel iron, so everyone's looking a bit bedraggled! Last week I had to give in and buy a refurbished mini-hoover or I could not have let anyone in without handing out free antihistamines for the dust!

After every meal I now run about like a mad thing getting dishes into the dishwasher and crawling under the table with a brush and pan, just in case. Viewers invariably want their viewings to coincide with meal times so the kids are getting very late, very fast and preferably so-bland-it-doesn't-smell food - kind of the opposite of our family norm, where the majority of communal time is spent round the dining table, with spicy and pungent offerings. I suspect we will soon bore of pizzas and pesto pasta.

The estate agent has advised us to tidy all surfaces to make everything look more spacious so a lot a unnecessary time is being spent on hunting through drawers to find where we last hid the oven gloves, salt, diluting juice and all such things that usually happily stand about in full view. I've just found a half eaten curry I'd hidden in the oven when a viewer turned up early the other day! Yeuch.

It's nice living clutter-free. I miss some of my stuff but surprisingly little of it... Amaia came out with the rather cutting, but to-the-point remark 'next time we own a house can we make it look like this while we're living in it, rather than for the other people!', the other day and I felt a bit like a 9-year-old child who was being castigated by their 51-year-old parent rather than the other way round! But she has a point - going forward we need to go simultaneously for more space and fewer belongings. Yes, Thomas, I'm talking to you, hon!

Thinking back on when we sold the flat in Garnethill in 2007, I have no idea how I managed to keep up this level of tidiness for the four months it was on the market, especially given I was five months pregnant when it went on! Having been told it would sell in less than a week and for a crazy price, Northern Rock collapsed a few days in, starting the financial meltdown in the UK. Back then, the norm was to buy then sell when you were in a sought-after area such as Garnethill, Newton Mearns or similar. I still recall how it felt to be nine months pregnant with three kids and two mortgages. We had £35 left at the end of the month once all our direct debits went out - less than a tenner a week for five people, with a baby on the way! I'm surprised we got through that!

So this time I'm holding my breath that something Brexit-related, or for that matter Boris-related doesn't land me in that situation again, minus the baby. Moving country and starting from scratch is stressful enough without anything else being thrown into the mix...

House selling

We're selling our house at the moment in a bid to escape the asylum before Brexit bites, so feel free to share this link to our house :-)

Bob Marley

I woke up early... one of the downsides of middle age, I guess. Having exhausted all other options, I stuck my music on shuffle and was lying in bed listening when Bob Marley came on singing Could you be loved. Bob Marley never fails to make me smile. I remember spending my teens listening to Exodus on my cassette player, but mostly he makes me think of one particular story involving my dad. Given today is the 7th anniversary of the day we lost my dad, I thought instead of feeling sad, I'd share a wee story that still makes me laugh 30 plus years on.

Dad used to drop me in Glasgow when I was a uni student and I'd either walk up to the West end if the weather was fine or jump on the tube. Every morning he'd listen to the breakfast show on the radio. For an intelligent man, Dad was known to come out with some mind-blowing howlers at times. That morning No Woman no Cry came on and he listened to it quietly, paused and then said quite seriously: 'I never understood that track'. Puzzled, as it seemed fairly self-evident to me, I asked what he found confusing. He replied 'No woman, no crime. I just don't get it!' 😂 I guess he wasn't quite as tuned in to the Jamaican accent as the younger generation. Lol.

Ok, what am I doing wrong?

Ok, so what is it I'm doing wrong? I'm way too snowed under at the moment to read the instruction manual or watch the tutorials. I presume it must be stuck on some kind of burst mode but I just need to know how to switch it off, otherwise I'm going to be knee-deep in photos of seriously disturbing alien weans! (It's a Panasonic Lumix GX-80, for what it's worth!)

Photo

Isn't this a pretty photo of Thomas's new car? I took it on the beach at Flyvesandet the other day.

Basement flats in Edinburgh

Having lived in the west end of Glasgow for many years, I thought I knew what basement flats looked like... These, in Hamilton Park Avenue, are fairly typical...

But this year Marcel has got himself a main door flat in Edinburgh, complete, he boasted, with private front garden. The first time I visited was at night, so I didn't notice the two 'holes' in his front garden, but last time I was over, they fascinated me enough that I had to have a photo. What a strange set up - both for the downstairs inhabitant, who can't be getting much light into their house, and to Marcel's flat - it just takes returning home at 3am a little drunk, and you could actually fall a metre or more into a hole in the garden and come face to face with your neighbour. I wonder who thought this was a good design!? One hearty laugh on that bench and you could end up literally six feet under!

Maybe we're mad, but we need to be us

People think we're mad...

No one has explicitly said it, and many of our more politically clued-up friends actually think we've called it correctly, but I'd say in general the vast majority of people I meet think we're overreacting to Brexit. Maybe we are, but only time will tell and time isn't on our side.

The general themes I hear again and again, especially now I have officially announced that we're leaving is 'surely, it'll all work out ok, isn't it worth just waiting to see?'. 

I've had several interesting conversations over the last few weeks...

One with a EU national friend, who lives here but hasn't looked into any Brexit implications because he has a job so it is 'bound to be fine' (for him, his foreign wife and all their kids!) He looked somewhat shocked when I said we were leaving and pointed out that under the no-deal scenario none of his current rights were guaranteed and yes, he has a job, but should he lose it at any point, what would the implications be of living as an unemployed EU national in the UK post-no-deal Brexit? The simple fact that banks, landlords, the NHS etc are yet to receive any guidelines on how to deal with the remaining EU nationals going forward should there be a no deal should be enough to set the tiniest of alarm bells ringing, but for the most part people like to assume the best.

Another conversation was with an acquaintance who said it was bound to all get sorted as she couldn't leave with her foreign spouse for the EU as she was currently undergoing some medical treatment. It is true, she needs to complete that, but it is definitely not true that that means everything will work out ok in the end!

Two friends' husbands have lost their banking jobs in the last fortnight to 'moves to continental Europe, just in case'. If the government signs a deal, these jobs aren't coming back and the friends' husbands and their newly unemployed colleagues will need to fight over the remaining banking jobs, in a sector that is not exactly recruiting at the moment.

A huge amount of economic damage (and damage to our reputation as a trustworthy business-oriented country) has been done even if the UK cancels the whole thing tomorrow. Foreign companies are scared to invest with this level of indecision and uncertainty, university lecturers who've put the wheels in motion to leave, will continue to do so until things have fully calmed down, researchers will carry out their work at EU unis in the meantime just in case things go a bit mad again - they just don't need that hassle...

But I think even more than the economic uncertainty, the thing that is making me most uncomfortable is the wave of right-wing nastiness this whole process has unleashed.

For twenty plus years my kids have walked round ASDA and the likes speaking a different language with me or with their dad, feeling a wee bit special and a wee bit exotic, proud even. They are Scottish but they are also something else. If you don't see their names or you only speak to them in English, you have no inkling they are different. The older ones have won prizes at high school for coming top in English, so living in a different language at home doesn't exactly have an adverse effect. They are not less than Scottish, they are more than Scottish. That has universally been met with intrigue, excitement and positivity. Just last week in school my girls were asked to host a Denmark stall at the school's diversity day. Here in Scotland that is still an acceptable thing to celebrate, but for how much longer? The UK is no longer the country it was. I am beginning to feel that I should warn my kids against showing their foreignness as explicitly. On the school trip they do to Blackpool at 12, I might feel compelled to tell them they are best not to speak their other language out loud. At some point in the future will we reach the point where they might be better changing their surname from Buchanan-Widmann to Buchanan? If that is the case, then this is not their country. My family thrives on its diversity and having to hide it means we will no longer be us. As the UK becomes smaller and more insular, I can't help but feel we will become second-class citizens. I want to feel excited in the future if my kids bring home partners from other cultures, countries or religions, not frightened for them.

When we reach the day that I lose my EU citizenship, and with it my right to freedom of movement, it will be too late to wish I had jumped ship on time. Nothing will bring back my ability to make that choice, so that is why we are doing what we are doing. My kids aren't just British citizens, they are citizens of the world, or of Europe at least, the kind of people our esteemed leader refers to as citizens of nowhere. Hiding who we are so we are allowed to stay in a country where fewer an fewer foreign people come to study, do research, invest and live is not an option.

My mother has eight grandchildren: 3 who are exclusively Scottish, and 5 who are dual nationals. In the future will these cousins be separated into first-class and second-class UK citizens by their passports or surnames, despite the genetic link?

But even once we're living abroad, I still hope for my country and for future generations that it can see sense as once again turn to look outward and see what it can learn from cooperation and integration.

Brotherly love

Conversation of the day...
Léon: I have to say, Anna has been really pleasant today.
Me: Anna went to Akshara's house before you woke up and is still there!
Léon: Awwwh, really! That explains a lot. 

What a doughball😜

Chinese pandan cake

Charlotte has long since surpassed me on the baking front, but I have to say this pandan cake she rustled up yesterday has to be her most moist and delightful offering yet.

I thought it looked nice colourised so am sticking it here for posterity!

Worms

Kids really crease you up at times. Amaia's topic at school at the moment seems to be something to do with nature and living things so she's developed a sudden interest in worms - to the extent that she filled a lunchbox with earth and worms and took them to school today! I made the mistake of asking why she found worms so fascinating:

"Well, worms are just amazing - did you know that is you cut a worm in half, it doesn't die, you just end up with two worms instead of one! Technically, if you were a worm you could actually marry yourself! You could have a wee ceremony and the person in charge would have to say something like 'Do you bottom, take you head to be your husband?' And then each half of the worm could say 'I do!' 😂"

Sailing away from the darkness

When we announced on our blogs a few weeks ago that we had decided to abandon the sinking ship, The National newspaper contacted us both and asked us each to write a piece on our imminent escape. Those articles in turn, were picked up on by the Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten and they too asked us for an editorial.

The article will be published tomorrow and is behind a paywall, but I'll upload it once the paper newspaper comes out and Thomas takes a picture of it or scans it in, but in the meantime, I had to share the cutest thing with you...
(Update: here it is)

They asked me for a photo of us and the kids who are leaving with us to use to illustrate the article, so I sent them my Facebook profile picture, assuming they'd use that, but instead, they had their caricature guy draw this! Isn't it the sweetest thing you ever saw? They got Amaia's hair length wrong as it isn't visible on the photo, but other than that we're definitely all recognisable, right down (or up) to Léon's ears! 😂

A tiny glimpse of her foreignness

If you never see my kids at home, or with their dad, or grandparents, you could be forgiven for not realising they aren't your average Scottish weans. They've always lived here, there isn't even a hint of foreignness in their accents, and rarely in their turn of phrase. It's only if you hear them with their dad, that you realise they actually spend half of their time at home in another language...

But every so often something gives it away, whether that is referring to December 24 as Xmas, or having friends round to beat up piñatas for no apparent reason on the Sunday before Pancake day, or whatever. Today was one of those days. We're trying to eat our way through the kitchen so we're having strange dinner combos at the moment. Tonight we found Ikea meatball sauce but no meatballs, so Léon improvised with a links sausage and a square sausage each. I suspect most nine year old Scottish kids would know what that was called, so I had to laugh when Amaia came out with the throw-away line - 'I definitely prefer square sausages to cylinder sausages!' I don't tend to cook sausages, so she's probably only ever heard them discussed in Danish before, but today Daddy's not home, so she had to find a name for them in English.

Henceforth, I will always refer to them as cylinder sausages. 😁

Half birthday restored

In our family we celebrate 'half birthdays'... It's not my side that came up with it but Thomas's - I presume it dates back to their childhood. Both Thomas and his sister have winter birthdays (February and January, respectively), and given their parents used to take them off to their Italian summer house every year, the kids sneakily came up with the idea that if they had half birthdays, they'd have a great excuse to beg two Italian gelateria trips during their summer break.

Given five of the seven of us also have winter birthdays between December 19 and February 8, it didn't take too much arm twisting to continue this tradition into the next generation. Marcel was born on July 27, so his half birthday has never been much of a highlight to be honest, but his real birthday often involves ice cream, foreign climes and beaches so that's ok.

Léon is as European as a child can be. Genetically he's Scottish, a tiny bit English, and he's also a quarter French and German. He has been brought up since birth by a Dane, so is culturally Danish. He's top of his French class, he's a fluent Danish speaker, he can even get by in Italian and is about to start German and Spanish. His favourite place in the world is Italy, where he spends up to six weeks at a time, roaming the Italian mountains with his band of little Italian friends: Aurora, Viola and Alessia. He has aunts and uncles in Denmark and France, a sister who spends the most part of her free time in Spain. Léon started watching subtitled movies at about eight and spends his Saturday nights steeped in Icelandic thrillers, Spanish series and similar. He's even picked up a lot of Swedish from watching 'the Bridge', and often speaks to me in Swedish on the school run just for fun, driving both Anna and Amaia mad... But there's a problem: Léon was born on September 29. About 18 months ago the horror struck him in all its glory. Fucking Theresa May hadn't just triggered article 50, devastating the whole family, she'd triggered it to run out on March 29 - Léon's half birthday!!!

As we've been approaching the date, few families have been as affected by the whole thing, as ours. We've decided to emigrate because of it, so you don't get much steeper than that, but on top of that, celebrating in any shape or form on Brexit day would have been anathema to us.

Léon's face, last week when the EU stepped in and saved the day (even if only by two weeks) was truly something to behold. Looks like Friday's ice cream might just be back on after all!

Brexit - this week.

What the UK press says will happen:

• Tonight - May's vote will be defeated, mainly because remainers want a softer deal 
• Tomorrow - No Deal will be voted down
• Thursday - they will vote to ask for an extension to negotiate a whole new deal
• Friday - the EU will ask how many days, weeks or years they'd like and start the new negotiations
• Every group, from ERG to Remain think they will be able to get exactly what they want.

What the foreign press says will happen:

• Tonight - May's vote will be defeated, mainly because remainers want a softer deal
• Tomorrow - No Deal will be voted down
• Thursday - they will vote to ask for an extension to negotiate a whole new deal
• Friday - the EU will roll their eyes, say the UK has put no new ideas on the table and say their very max is a six week extension till the EU elections but they'd prefer no extension at all
• Remainers will wonder why they didn't vote for May's deal and then spend the transition period negotiating a softer Brexit. ERG will jump with joy as No Deal kicks in.

No-deal Brexit and language degree courses

We seem to have been going round and round on the same merry-go-round now for nearly a year. No-deal Brexit will mean troops on the streets, food shortages, the selling off of the NHS, pet passports being defunct, rationing, chlorinated chickens, Erasmus withdrawn, job losses, planes grounded, driving licences no longer being valid in the EU, medicine rationing, loss of citizens' rights, EHICs down the toilet and roaming charges back, currency collapse and price hikes... Almost every article mentions a subset of these, so I thought I'd look at an angle no one has yet mentioned, because it is potentially pertinent to my family.

When Charlotte signed up to study Economics and Spanish at Glasgow university in May of 2018, her course starting in September of the same year, she based that decision on the 2017-18 Glasgow University prospectus that described her five year course, with the third year spent in Spain as a language assistant. This isn't the same as an Erasmus scheme, where you study abroad at a university. I know this scheme well, having taken part in it myself in 1987-88, when I was the assistante d'anglais at Lycée Jean Lurçat in Bruyères, France. (How many times I had to correct them when they referred to me as the assistante anglaise!) Here's a photo of my flatmate (the German assistant) at our school from '88!

I asked her when she signed up what would happen to the compulsory year abroad after Brexit and she looked blank. 'I'm sure it'll all be fine' was her standard response for months. Now the lunatics are discussing a 'no deal' scenario, she's upgraded that reply to 'I guess if they don't sort it out, they'll need to cancel it for everyone'.

In Charlotte's case this would be really annoying given she is a French national so actually would still have the right to work abroad, but as she pointed out, if only five kids out of 1000 have dual nationality, they are just going to blanket-cancel it rather than sort it out for those who are still eligible.

I can see several major issues with this. A long term issue I can see is this: Kids up to and including the academic year 2018-19 will have taken part in this scheme. Presumably a year or two into Brexit, the government will have negotiated a reciprocal agreement again meaning this can resume, so there will be a group of language students, starting with the 2017 intake and spanning two to three years who will have missed out on this. As an employer, wouldn't you give those graduates a wide berth, if they are the only ones with lesser degrees and no real language experience? So not only will they miss out on the opportunity of a lifetime, they will also be seen as lesser graduates when they leave uni.

Secondly, and more urgently, not for Charlotte but for the 2017 intake... These kids are due to leave the UK for posts all over Europe this September. They will already have applied to schools in Spain, France, Germany etc and will be receiving their postings around Easter. If the UK goes 'no deal' at the end of this month and all of these places are revoked every uni offering modern languages in the UK is going to be faced with a year of students returning to class in September that they have not budgeted for. They'll need class space, they'll need tutors and lecturers, they'll need to book university accommodation for the 2019-20 session that they had not expected to need. Student accommodation tends to get booked around now, at the latest, so many of these kids are going to find their placement cancelled, they'll not have a room for next year and none will be available. They won't have filled out their forms for loans or tuition fees as they aren't expecting to return for that academic session. It's going to cause complete administrative chaos in universities across the country as well as panic and heartache in the kids themselves.

Is there anything left 'un-fucked-up' by this government?

A momentous decision

I'm wondering if there's much point in me blogging this given my other half already has, but I guess only having our communal friends knowing what's going on might result in a few strange looks a week/month or two down the line.
For anyone who knows me on Facebook, it'll come as no surprise to you that I am not the biggest fan of Brexit - unless of course you've missed my four ranty posts a day for the last two years.

When the UK voted Leave back in June of 2016, I wasn't as horrified, in retrospect, as I should have been. That isn't because I was lukewarm to EU membership, but more because I'm so European, I think of the EU as 'us' and the UK as 'them', so my initial assumption was - the UK will hang about the periphery, sulking for a few years while 'we' get on with business without 'them' sticking their oar in in their usual petty and annoying fashion all the time.

Given I had assumed Norway was the worst possible route a sane government could opt for, I didn't think it would have much of a negative impact on my life or family... Then came May's red-line speech declaring that we'd voted to leave the Customs Union and the Single Market and ditch free movement and a host of other crap, I for one didn't see on the ballot paper - maybe we got the abridged version up here in Scotland?

Within hours she'd scathingly branded me, my family, and most of our friends as 'citizens of nowhere', rather than as we tend to celebrate 'citizens of Europe'; citizens with family and friends everywhere. For thirty years I had celebrated our diversity, our mixed culture and the many languages we use at the dining table every day in life. I loved that all my kids could fluently speak two languages and had two passports each. But suddenly the person in charge of the country where I lived, a narrow and insular excuse for a person, was telling me the way I had lived my life since I'd met my first foreign boyfriend at sweet 16, was illegitimate and no longer tolerable. My type of family was to be stamped out going forward. Would a day come when instead of proudly teaching their classmates a few words of their other mother tongue, they'd have to hide their foreignness? Would they have to drop their foreign surname from their CV later in life to get an interview?

Alarmed doesn't come close to how I began to feel in the autumn of 2016. And still, I had fully underestimated the madness that would follow. Early on, we started to discuss our own red lines, Thomas and I. If freedom of movement was to go, then families like ours would also probably have to go, in our eyes. We figured the latest it would become obvious, what the government was actually working towards was December 2017, so that would give us fifteen months to come up with a workable plan. I'd lie awake in bed for hours every night analysing what the likelihoods were. December 2017 came and went, with our kids clued up enough to be asking all the right questions about what the UK was aiming for, but strangely though they knew the ins and outs, the government didn't seem to. Senior politicians embarrassed us by trying to negotiate with EU countries separately, not grasping the fundamentals of how the EU even works, after 40 years membership! They were completely blasé about any effect this could have on peace in Northern Ireland and downright outrageous in their complete disregard of the Scottish 62% (and rising ever since) pro-EU vote.

Every deadline was missed and EU families like ours waited and waited for clarity, pawns in their grotesque game. I got to the point where I had to turn the news off as it was making me feel physically sick.

By Christmas of 2018, I had been through my own rather huge trauma; a cancer scare. When finally I got the all clear, the only woman on my ward who did, I knew we had to take back our future. Not having to go through the chemo everyone else was faced with meant that other than trying to recover, I could move on. I had spent too many sleepless night worrying about whether we could stay together as a family, about the state the UK economy, the NHS and the Higher education system would be in by the time my three youngest hit adulthood.

I could see Brexit was going to be dire for my company. Thomas works as an IT and linguistics consultant, so his work would dry up quickly in a recession - why pay to make people redundant when you can simply drop the consultants who have no employment rights? My work had been a bit precarious as I'd been off sick (though unpaid) so I was clawing my way back up that hill. All my foreign work had been gained on the basis of my running an EU-based consultancy. By March 29, I would no longer be running an EU-based one, but rather one floating on the edge of the EU with no obvious guidelines to follow. That would make it close to impossible for our company to win any EU contracts we bid on going forward. And of course, given the falling value of the pound, the EU work I did was the most lucrative of all. We estimated at least half of our business would dry up because of Brexit and that wasn't the kind of hit we could take.

Out of the blue, Thomas saw a job ad for a senior IT linguistics post in Denmark - the equivalent of heading up the IT section of the Académie française, but in Denmark. We agreed it was a lifeboat worth applying for, just to have on standby in case the government was insane enough to let the country crash and burn. Of course, when he applied we assumed it would remain a parachute, tightly packed under our seat because no sane Prime Minister would take a country to the edge of the abyss just to stop her party falling apart...

So there we were with 28 days to go and an ultimatum - sign up for the Danish lifeboat or risk staying in the UK, where Thomas's rights to healthcare, his continued right to have a mortgage here, or his right to remain, should he lose his job had not been guaranteed by a government so openly hostile to foreigners that they were deporting Windrush grandparents who no longer remembered coming to the UK as toddlers. Had we been a fully EU couple, like many of Charlotte's uni lecturers, we could have waited to see how bad things got and then decided to leave after Brexit, but I am the sticking point... six members of my family can leave after Brexit, but I become landlocked in the UK once my freedom of movement is removed, be that at 11pm in 22 days time, or after transition in December 2020, should they sign some last minute version of May's catastrophic deal next week.

It's isn't what we would have chosen to do. Thomas moved to Scotland, learnt Scots and feels Scottish. We never expected to feel so insecure in our home that we'd feel our only option was to flee the country, but that is what we have decided to do.

I have good days where I am almost excited at the prospect of living on mainland Europe, (well on an island tethered to the mainland by a bridge at least) and being able to drive all sorts of cool places for the weekend. And I have other days where I shake and cry and hide under the duvet as it is all too big to contemplate. I'm old, too old to start my life again from scratch. Removal costs are so high we are having to give away most of what we own and start again, without so much as a bed or a couch. We're going to have to sell our cars and house and transfer the money abroad, potentially as sterling crashes to a point where we can't make enough to buy a home there. We're having to magically find £7000 from nowhere to cover forcing Charlotte into University halls for a year - we can't exactly put that on her shoulders when she didn't choose this fate. When I think how long it will be before we break even I'm terrified and that's before the sadness hits of dragging the three wee ones out of schools we know and love, away from their dear friends. Marcel and Charlotte both came top of their high school year at one of the top three state schools in Scotland, and the wee ones have that same potential. Is it fair to plunge the wee ones into a system they don't know, in a language, that of course they speak, but not to the same standard as they speak English? Hopefully they'll learn to fly.

But if the economists are right, we're taking them away from a recession that will overshadow the remainder of their childhood, to a country everyone always says is one of the happiest of all. The work life balance will be better, the houses cheaper, the higher education free... It's been a hard choice to make, but I feel our hands are tied, so Denmark, it'll have to be. And when you decide to do something, there is no point in feeling sorry for yourself or dragging your feet. I'm going to find a way to do this well and make the best of a situation I didn't choose. I'm going to come home as many weekends as possible to help Charlotte, mum and my brother cope with this change and I'm going to hope as many of our friends and our kids' friends feel like a visit over the next few years as possible - maybe just to visit us or maybe because we'll be close to the original and definitive Legoland. Some of you might decide to come so you can have a meal that doesn't contain chlorinated chicken and rat poo or just to feel European again... I genuinely mean you are welcome - or will be once we have somewhere to stay. I've lived abroad before so I know it isn't always the most obvious candidates who drop by for a visit - but what I do know is that it is always fun when they do!

With still no clarity of Remain/May's Deal/No deal and now only three weeks to go, all I know is I'm moving to Funen either some time in the next two weeks or some time before the kids finish this school year. It's shocking to still have no clarity when you're this close to the precipice.

But to a certain extent, it feels good to regain control of my future after 984 days with the clowns in charge of the circus.